Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Pinterest revisited

Since I only wrote about Pinterest.com yesterday, it seems a little early to revisit the program, but I played around with it enough to finally get the idea of what was going on and by the way, I do see a future for genealogists in this type of program. The comments to my earlier post were also helpful in illustrating how people were using the program. Some of my initial impressions seem to be confirmed. The program is overwhelmingly used by women in the 20 to 40 year old range. In checking out the Pinterest pages of my daughters and some of my other younger acquaintances, I would conclude that they make up the bulk of the early users.

Not that there is anything wrong with this at all. In today's world, genealogy is about sources and source are about images, hence, Pinterest.com. Although genealogists are fond of stating that genealogy is one of the major hobbies or pastimes in the world, looking a social networking sites will quickly belie this unfounded claim. Food is far and beyond the more popular topic and genealogy doesn't appear on any general list of suggested topics for categories of pages in Pinterest.com or any other major social networking site. Speaking of food, Pinterest.com is not a good site to view on an empty stomach especially if you are watching your weight.

One thing I found annoying, was that Pinterest.com automatically incorporated my entire list of "friends" from Facebook.com. I realize now, too late it seems, that I did not have to do this and could have limited my selection of "friends" to a more manageable flow, but I can always unfriend people at the risk of being ostracized myself. I also find the timeline to be disturbing. Why do I want to know every time I change one photo from one page to another? Maybe I will find a way to turn this feature off or get used to having a running commentary on my mistakes.

One thing I plan to do is use Pinterest.com as another way to help identify people in old photographs. The graphic interface seems ideal to this activity and probably quite a few others I will think of as time goes on.

Although it may not seem obvious at first, Pinterest.com appears at least as useful as Evernote.com for cataloging links to websites, as long as you don't mind sharing everything with the whole world. Speaking of which, it also appears that privacy has become even more marginalized by this site. How private is your life, if I can go onto Pinterest.com and see dozens of websites you have collected? I assume that this site (or something like it) will become more and more popular. It certainly appears to be the "next big thing" on the Internet.

1 comment:

James, I'm interested to know if you see any legal problems involving copyright with people pinning images from the internet to their pinterest boards. I've heard rumblings of a stew brewing. Any comment or legal perspective about this? Thanks.